But if the Black man has advanced so remarkably in Southern slavery, may we not expect him to advance still more remarkably, especially now that he is a free man? At first blush, this expectation may seem plausible; but a very little reflection and observation must show its vanity. The first sharp breath of winter lends a keen edge to the appetite; the continued cold does not make it keener and keener. The fagged-out man of business or leader of society retires to some cool and quiet health resort and reacts almost instantly. In a week he gains ten pounds, in two weeks fifteen, in a month twenty; but it would be a great mistake to suppose that this rate of gain could be maintained for any considerable time. The natural effect of the changed and improved conditions is soon exhausted, the limits set in the constitution of the subject are soon reached. So, too, in the domestication of plants and animals. A marvellous superficial alteration may be speedily brought about, but the bound is close at hand and is approached with rapidly decreasing velocity that soon becomes hardly perceptible. By no such means is any steady progress possible. Precisely so in the domestication, education, civilization of the lower races. These latter do undoubtedly possess undeveloped potentialities; they are capable of better things. The immediate result of subjecting them to new conditions that stimulate their powers may often be highly gratifying. But herein lies no promise whatever of any progressive amelioration. The boundaries are near by; nor can they be overstepped by any such extra-organic agencies. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that, in perhaps every such case, there is some sacrifice--it may be a fatal sacrifice--of the native vigour of the primitive stock. This reflection is completely confirmed by the actual example of the Negro in a state of freedom. Unless all the statistical indications be grossly misleading, the movement of the Afro-American average in the last generation has been down and not up, backward and not forward.[12] Especially the physical decline has been measurable and ominous. In Haiti the same experiment has been carried much further, and with results proportionately more disastrous. A hundred years of internecine strife have witnessed nothing but a slow reversion to barbarism. The interest on the public debt remains unpaid, agriculture is most primitive, manufactures languish, the industries for which the island was once famous are dead or dying, the beautiful French language is Africanized into a structureless patois.[13] [12] See _infra_, Chapter Six. [13] Thus, the proverb: Un sac qui est vide ne peut pas rester debout, becomes: Sac qui vide pas connait ete debout.